David Poeppel
The Society for the Neurobiology of Language is pleased to announce the 2025 Distinguished Career Award recipient: David Poeppel
The Distinguished Career Award is generously sponsored by Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.
Rhythms and algorithms: The temporal structure of linguistic experience
Saturday, September 13, 2025, 9:00 - 9:45 am, Elstad Auditorium
Speaker: David Poeppel, Max Planck Society, New York University
About David Poeppel
Professor David Poeppel is an internationally acclaimed cognitive neuroscientist who is currently Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at New York University, and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. David Poeppel is a leading figure in the field of auditory neuroscience and neuroscience of language and author of more than 230 articles in prestigious neuroscience and cognitive science journals.
This remarkable body of work is not merely a collection of scientific papers, but a transformative program of research for the neurobiology of language. Throughout his career, David Poeppel has advanced the theoretical and empirical understanding of the neural foundations of speech and language processing and, most importantly, how the two interface. His unwavering advocacy for establishing a robust linking hypothesis between linguistics and neuroscience stands as a defining cornerstone for the field. David Poeppel's work and his influential voice have been instrumental in the growing field of neurobiology of language. He played a pivotal role in the founding and the nurturing of the Society for Neurobiology of Language.
David Poeppel’s theoretical and empirical contributions are broad and profound. His Asymmetric Sampling in Time (AST) hypothesis has been foundational in revolutionizing our understanding of temporal integration and lateralization in auditory processing (Poeppel, 2003). Subsequently, the "dual-stream model" of speech processing, developed in tandem with Gregory Hickok (Hickok & Poeppel, 2007), shifted the paradigm by proposing that language processing unfolds along two interconnected neural pathways, ventral and dorsal, marking a definitive departure from the classical Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model toward a more sophisticated and empirically grounded understanding of language architecture. His collaboration with Anne-Lise Giraud (Giraud & Poeppel, 2012) produced an influential and biologically plausible framework for speech parsing in which cortical rhythms - theta and gamma in particular – encode the temporal structure of speech with remarkable precision. Together with his students and postdocs, David Poeppel carried out some of the most highly cited and impactful empirical studies in the neurobiology of language recognized for their conceptual innovation, experimental rigor, and elegance.
Last and not least, David Poeppel exemplifies the qualities of an exceptional mentor who has profoundly influenced the next generation of scientists, particularly women. He has supervised over 30 PhD students and more than 40 postdocs – many having a significant presence in the field of cognitive neuroscience at large – and inspired countless others through summer courses, engaging lectures, online debates and podcasts.